Based on a  Sermon by  Robert M. Eddy, M.Div.

Interim Minister, Unitarian Universalist Church of Indianapolis

Delivered 18 February 1996

FIRST READING

From a radio interview  OF Malcolm X by Les Crane,   December 2 1964

[In April 1964 I made the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca.  One of the things that Elijah Muhammad always taught us was that Islam is … a religion in which no whites could participate … he told us that Mecca was forbidden to non Muslims and since a white person couldn’t be a Muslim … he said that no white could enter Mecca.   Well,… [when I]  was there [I met] …a member of the Turkish parliament [who] … pointed out that Mecca during the … pilgrimage season … would be an anthropologists paradise, because every specimen of humanity is represented there.  … when I saw this with my own eyes.  … I [saw that] Islam is a religion of brotherhood.   But this belief in brotherhood doesn’t alter the fact that I’m also an African American, or American Negro [if] you wish, in a society which has very serious and severe race problems which no religion can blind me to. … I don’t delude myself into dreaming or falling for a dream … before it exists … some of the leaders of our people in this country … say that they … believe in this dream.  But while they’re dreaming, our people are having a nightmare [.]

SECOND READING

 Malcolm and Martin,  James Baldwin,1968

“Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much;  and yet every  human being is an unprecedented miracle.  One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they’ve become.   This is not very different from the act of faith demanded by all those marches and petitions while Martin was still alive.   One could scarcely be deluded by Americans  any more, one scarcely dared expect anything from the great, vast, blank generality;  and yet one was compelled to demand of [white] Americans – and for their sakes, after all – a generosity, a clarity, and a nobility which they did not dream of demanding of themselves.

Part of the error was irreducible, in that the marchers and petitioners were forced to suppose the existence of an entity which – when the chips were down, could not be located –  [the entity? ]  – the American people.   There are no American people yet.  Perhaps, however the moral of the story (and the hope of the world) lies in what one demands, not of others but of oneself.  However that may  be, the failure and the betrayal are in the record book forever, and sum up and condemn, forever, those descendants of a barbarous Europe who arbitrarily and arrogantly reserve the right to call themselves Americans.”

 

SERMON

On no other Sunday since coming to Indiana have I stood here with less confidence that I have something significant to share than today.   What can I, a privileged rather ordinary senior white man possibly know of the life of two extraordinary “black”men who were struck down in the prime of life thirty one and twenty seven years ago?  What can I know of the life of thousands of young “black” men in this city today who must deal with the reality that there may be no way for them to achieve the things America values at the beginning of the third millennium?  The ambitious outline you read in the newsletter describing the questions I hoped to address this morning mock my ignorance – and my hubris.

I share this confession of frustration with you because it is something new for me.  Since I participated in one of the first sit in’s in Washington D.C. in 1947 – yes that’s correct, nineteen forty seven,  I’ve considered myself rather more enlightened than most,  but something happened to me last Month.

As I had believed  for many years I should do but had never done,  I betook me to a “black” Church on Martin Luther King’s birthday.   I was one of perhaps five white faces in a congregation of 250 or more.  I found myself in an alien culture.  All pretense of identity with these descendants of slaves melted away.   This was not the polite “oreo cookie” church service I was used to.  This was the  “black” Church;  a culture as  foreign to my experience as Tibet – yet walking the same streets I walk  every day.   I could not maintain my usual  tranquility.  It was a wrenching emotional experience.

The service began with the recorded voice of Martin Luther King; from the speech he delivered on the eve of his assassination.  As always, I responded to the tidal cadences carrying  the dreamers’ words.   But  in that place I did not feel he was including me when he said, “We will get to the promised land.”  My people were  never enslaved..  I am not  one the still economically enslaved African Americans many of whom who sat around me that afternoon.  I am of Pharaoh’s tribe.  Thus, I felt strangely hypocritical singing what has been called “The Negro National Anthem.”  which now appears in the Presbyterian as well as the Unitarian hymnal.  “Stony the road  I trod?”   No, not at all.   My road was been well paved.   It seemed an insult to my hosts and hostesses for me to sing that song.   And even today,  I questioned and question  my  right to a sentimental identification with a people – that people who are “white like me” kept, and to an intolerable extent, still keep – in bondage.

I want to believe that James Baldwin’s words, which you heard earlier, are no longer true.   I want to believe that  the sermon I preached thirty five years ago “Message from another country” –  which I wrote after a summer living with my family in a “black” Ghetto –  no longer reflects American reality.  I would like to believe that  we have made real progress towards a “color blind” America – I want to believe it but I can’t .   I am acutely aware, as I have perhaps never been before, how far white Americans have to go.

Part of the trouble is that Martin Luther King made it easy for whites like me.  He had led a relatively privileged life.   He was a man of superior intellect and academic training.  A man civility and  moral discernment – not a perfect man – but a man to whom I thought I could relate.   I shared his dream but I could  not really share his experience that I now know.  I thought I knew him.   Malcolm X helped me realize that I really didn’t.

Malcolm and Martin were not friends.   They seemed the antithesis of one another yet they shared more than they realized.  Both were sons of Baptist ministers – but Martin’s Father “knew his place”.  It was a privileged place – as privileged as that of any “black” Man in Atlanta during Martin’s childhood.   Malcolm’s father was different; a “rabble rouser”’ an “uppety “black”” who didn’t “know his place.”  And he – Malcolm’s  father – was murdered for his refusal to “keep his place” in a Michigan that hypocritically prided itself on it’s role in the war to “free the slaves”.  A Michigan that  practiced a kind of segregation that made the “jim crow” laws of Georgia look positively beneficent.   Someone once said that,  “In the North they say rise as high as you can but don’t come too close while in the South they say, come as close as you want but don’t rise too high.”   Malcolm was the product of the worst kind of Northern racism and when he rose too high: when he was recognized by the leaders of African and Arab countries as a significant power in America he was cut down. That kind of racism is still out there- and it’s growing.

Martin too was a product of racism, Southern Racism.   And that Racism is also still out there,  less subtle, more honest and diminishing.

Indianapolis shared and shares the worst of  Northern and Southern Racism: a city that was controlled by the Ku Klux Klan when Malcolm was born;  a city which RESEGREGATED its schools in the 19202 with the building of Crispus Attucs High School for Negroes;  a city  which is still far more racially divided – at 38th Street – than you would have outsiders believe.

But I am no expert.   I claim no authority in this area.  I have many many questions but no answers.   For now,  I think it best to recognize that I may have nothing to say except to share my quandary.

1985 was a strange year for race relations.   A year in which the person who, it seemed, everybody wanted to enter the political arena was a “”black””

man.   I doubt there was any more admired person in American in 1995 than Colon Powell.  Yet 1995 was also the year when  institutions that had enabled men like Powell to rise to the top of his profession were being dismantled in a backlash of “white power.”   We live in a strange time when television portrays “black” men and women disproportionately in the professions while  one third of young “black” men have had an encounter with the  police.  A time when talented “black” men and women are represented in every profession but still in proportions far far lower than proportions than blacks” represent in the population at large.   A new comforting stereotype – as false as the “Steplinfetchit”  stereotype of my childhood is interfering with realistic appraisal of and confrontation with the systemic racism that still exists in America.

And still the competing visions  that Malcolm and Martin symbolized in their days on earth stand before us.   On one hand two “nations” one “black” one “white” sharing one piece of the earth, growing more equal economically  but separate and growing more separate in culture every year. The vision today identified with Louis Farrakhan.   The other vision:  one integrated nation; a rainbow of colors that  “judges  persons by the quality of his character not by the color of their skin.”  The vision today identified with people like Colon Powell.

I, like you, am committed to the latter vision – as was Martin Luther King, Jr. – as was Malcolm X by the time he was assassinated.  It may have been, in fact,  the change in Malcolm’s commitment that precipitated his assassination.

If you were to walk down Broadripple and ask the first 100 whites who today carried the Mantle of Malcolm, who would win the vote?

Yes, sadly enough, Louis Farrakhan.  But that is absolutely the wrong answer.  Let me read you something that appeared in the Indianapolis Times last October:

“Washington:  In an unusual public display of frustration, W. Deen Mohammed, leader of the nations’ largest African-American Muslim organization, this week lashed out at one-time colleague Louis Farrakhan, who he said is leading “black”s “further and further into darkness.”

Mohammed, son of the late Nation of Islam leader Elijah … said he was concerned that Farrakhan’s focus on past injustices suffered by “black”s would prevent the African-American  community from progressing.  He also attacked what he characterized as Farrakhan’s racial divisiveness…

Based in Calumet City, Ill…Mohammed claims some 1.5 million followers.  Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam has an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 followers.”

In other words, W. Deen Mohammed’s  organization represents 75 to 150 African Americans for every 1 represented by  Farrakhan’s organization.

Why then do most white Americans think that Farrakhan represents African American Moslems?

the Indianapolis News, October 28, 1995.

Given the fact that Malcolm X left and denounced the “The Nation of Islam” thirty two  years ago, and that Elijah Mohammed’s son dissolved the organization soon after his father’s death 21 years ago why does the press give so much attention to Louis Farrakhan, who refused to accept Orthodox Islam when so many of his colleagues did?  I think it has something to do with “white” racism.

In the last five years I have come to understand that Malcolm “X” and Martin Luther King had many many things in common.

They were different in many important ways  but in one way they were similar.   They both were ministers. They both bore a responsibility for the care of souls.

For  nearly  ten years Malcolm was minister of the largest “Black Muslim” Church in New York.   Now I know that mosque is the  “proper” word for a Muslim congregation, but  the religious institution to which Malcolm led was more like a  “black” church than  anything that most Muslims would call a Mosque.   Only after Malcolm broke with Elijah Muhammad and founded the Muslim Mosque on March 10 1964 could he be considered the leader of a Mosque.  Why?  Because  the so called  Mosques of  the so called “Black Muslims were no more mosques in the traditional sense than are the so called “Churches” of the Aryan Nation, Christian Churches.  It was Malcolm’s discovery of that  reality and his decision to cast his lot with Orthodox Islam that justifies linking him with Martin Luther King.

Malcolm laid out a clear and responsible alternative to the traditional  Christian leadership of the movement for the liberation of Americans who acknowledge an African ancestor.   It was a two pronged approach – as was Martin’s.   It had a both a religious and a secular face.  Martin spoke both as the minister of a Baptist congregation  and as the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Council.  As a Christian minister, Martin preached  love of enemies as a commandment binding on all who claimed to follow the prophet of Galilee.   As leader of the Southern Christian Leadership conference, Martin recommended nonviolent resistance as the most effective and most ethical means of achieving greater  racial justice in American society.

When Malcolm ceased being a spokesman for Elijah Muhammad and the institution Elijah Muhammad headed,  he became an internationally accepted leader of Islam in America and preached brotherhood without regard to race or national differences and respect for other “religions of the book”  – Judaism and Christianity.    But like Martin, Malcolm was also the leader of a movement.   Three months after he formed his Orthodox Mosque he founded another organization which he called  the Organization of Afro-American Unity. Two weeks later he addressed the African Summit Conference and appealed to the the delegates of the thirty-four African nations attending to bring the cause of the twenty-two million “black” people in the United States before the United Nations.

In the last year of his life, Malcolm X  was recognized by the leaders of the newly independent African States as a figure of more than national status. Martin Luther King had achieved that status the year before when he received the Nobel Peace Prize.   In September , October and November of 1964 Malcolm visited eleven  African nations,  talked with their heads of state and addressed most of their parliaments.  He had moved beyond the ideology of racial separatism and become a spokesman for a world religion: Islam.

Why then do the media continued identifying him with  the lies of the discredited Elijah Mohammed?  Perhaps it is to perpetuate the falsehood that the racism which still infects so many Euro- Americans is matched by a similar racism among African Americans.  That is a falsehood.  There is no way one can equate the wariness of the oppressed with the fear of the oppressors;  the fear that their victims will retaliate.  Calling both “racism” obfuscates rather than clarifies our situation.

 

I don’t know why the myth of parallel racisms is perpetuated.   Who gains from distorting the nature racism in American Society?

On February 16, 1965 Malcolm  gave a brilliant speech titled, “Not just an American Problem but a World Problem”  I’d like to share the end of that speech with you now:

“ African diplomats at the UN . . . [told me] that [they could not raise the plight of African Americans in the U.N.] as long as the “black” man in America calls his struggle a struggle [for] civil rights – that in the civil rights context,  it’s domestic and remains within the jurisdiction of the United States.  … If any of [those diplomats] open up their mouths to say anything about [racism in American], it’s considered a violation of the laws and rules of protocol. . . .  [O]ther [oppressed] people[s is] that they didn’t call their grievances ‘civil rights’ grievances,  they called them ‘human rights’ grievances.’  ‘Civil rights’ are within the jurisdiction of the government where they are involved.  But “human rights” is part of the charter of the United Nations.

Anyone who classifies his grievances under the label of ‘human rights violations, [can bring] those grievances . . .  into the United Nations [where they can]  be discussed by people all over the world.  …You can take your troubles to the World Court. . . . For as long as you call it “civil rights” your only allies can be the people in the next community, many of whom are responsible for your grievance.     [If you] take them before the world . . .  anybody anywhere on this earth can become your ally.

One of the first steps that we became involved in -those of us who got into the Organization of Afro-American Unity –   was to come up with  a program that would make our grievances international and make the world see that our problem was no longer a Negro problem or an American problem but a human problem.  A problem for humanity . . . a problem which should be attacked by all elements of humanity.”

 

Two weeks before his death Malcolm addressed the First Congress of the Council of African American Organizations.  The next day the French Government, considering him a threat to their still extensive sphere of influence, denied him entry into France.  Five days later his house was bombed.

On  February 16, 1965 he delivered the speech from which I’ve just quoted.   Five days later Malcolm was assassinated.

I’m not  usually a defender of conspiracy theories,  but it seems pretty clear to me that Both Malcolm and Martin were assassinated when their activities moved beyond  agitation for Civil Rights within the United States into agitation for Human rights on an global scale.   In the case of Malcolm it was his attempt to get an inditement in the United Nation’s General Assembly  of America’s treatment of it’s “black” citizens.  On What grounds?   On the grounds that the United States was in  violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.   In Martin’s case he crossed the forbidden line when he  took the Southern Christian Leadership Conference into the anti Vietnam   war movement.

On April 15, 1967 Martin Luther King  led a gigantic anti war  protest in New York City and was more and more speaking out against the immorality of the Vietnam War.  He was assassinated a year later.

I am convinced that the very same people who orchestrated the Assassination of Martin Luther King orchestrated the assassination of Malcolm X and even today work to demonize his memory.  Despite the magnificent film by Spike Jones most Americans, “black” and white identify Malcolm with the talented promoter of the racist message of Elijah Mohammed.  Despite the fact that most African American Muslims despise Louis Farrakhan the media promote him as their spokesman.

A white racist pulled the trigger on the gun that killed Martin and a “black” racist pulled the trigger on the gun that Killed Malcolm, but I think history will eventually honor them both as ministers who cared passionately, not only about the souls of “black” Americans, but for the soul of America herself.

Please join me in some moments of silent meditation..

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